1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, system, and article of manufacture for managing an archived file system.
2. Background
A file archiver is an application that may combine one or more files into one archive file, or a series of archive files. Many file archivers use data compression in order to reduce the size of the archive file. Certain file archivers take a plurality of files and concatenate the contents of the plurality of files sequentially into the archive file. The process of generating an archive file may be termed archiving or packing. Reconstructing the original files from an archive file may be termed unarchiving, unpacking or extracting.
One or more files or directories may be compressed and stored in an archive. The archive may have to be decompressed before an application can access the files or directories that are compressed and stored in the archived. For example, in certain versions of the Unix operating system the “tape archive” (TAR) file format may be used. On certain Windows platforms, the ZIP archive format may be used to archive files.
Different archiving software may use different compression and decompression algorithms, and may also use different encryption and decryption mechanisms to restrict access to the files or directories stored in the archives. In addition, different archiving software may provide different interfaces to add files to an archive, and to extract and access the files from the archive.
If an application needs to access files or directories that have been stored in an archive, the archive may have to be uncompressed and/or unarchived by the archiving software before the application can access the files or the directories. The archive file cannot be directly used by the application or by operating system commands for manipulating files or directories, such as, commands for copying files, listing the files in a directory, etc.